A Year in Reading: Hamilton Leithauser

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Robert Moses and Robert Caro dominated the first four months of my year with The Power Broker. It’s a bear, but a must read for any New Yorker, or anyone with any interest in manipulation, corruption, sneakiness, and lying. I loved it. Caro is such a good writer…my brother in law is taking on the Lyndon Johnson series right now, but I might need to rest up for that one. New York City is an entirely different place for me now. Robert Moses had more influence over the entire tri-state region — and arguably the entire United States — than any other person in the 20th century. It’s incredible how he operated “legally” outside of the reach of any legal authorities. He could just basically write his own laws. Actually, sometimes he literally wrote his own laws. Check it out.

The Circle by Dave Eggers. I recently got social on the Internet as a means of promoting my musical act. Coincidentally, within a week of signing up for all this stuff I read The Circle, and now I can’t sign into Facebook or Twitter without feeling like I’ve joined the Circle. I laughed many times through this, but honestly, for a guy who really didn’t know what was going on online before, I was dumbfounded more than anything else. I immediately tweeted about The Circle when I finished it.

Hamilton Leithauser
is a songwriter and musician living in New York City. He has released several solo records in the past few years, as well as a brand new single “Heartstruck (Wild Hunger).” He has two little daughters.

By far the book I found most memorable this year was Alissa Nutting’sTampa. The writing was so deliberate and satisfying, and I love when a writer fully commits to a premise. To wit: early in the book, Celeste Price marks her classroom with her vaginal juices, so she might better seduce one of the unsuspecting boys in her eighth grade class. As I read this scene, I literally gasped because I had never seen anything like it. The premise of Tampa, this chronicle of a relentless predator, is appalling but Nutting makes it possible to be appalled and entertained. Celeste is so consumed by her desire. She is so unapologetic. It’s freeing, as a reader, to engage with a character who does what she must to satisfy her needs. I found myself judging Celeste as much as I was intrigued by what she would do next. I was also impressed by the sly cultural critique Nutting offers throughout the novel, about the pressures and expectations women shoulder. Tampa is just amazing.
Meaty by Samantha Irby, was an outstanding essay collection. The essays are a winning combination of hilarious and tender and sad. Irby is not afraid to show the reader where she hurts and how but she does so with such energy and wit. The writing explores dating, living with Crohn’s Disease, losing both parents at a young age, race and class, and a great deal more, but each of these topics is approached uniquely and without self-pity or aimless recrimination. Irby is one hell of a writer.
I was also enamored by Taiye Selasi’sGhana Must Go. At first, I wasn’t quite sure where the novel was going. The first third is strangely given over to a man and his slippers. More is going on, of course, but it doesn’t make sense until you get much farther into the book. A man has died and his family must return to Ghana to mourn and to reconnect. Along the way, we learn how the family fell apart in the first place, and the price that is paid in leaving one country for another. The power of this novel lies in its completeness and the sweeping energy of the story being told. In the final pages, I found myself crying into the book as I turned each page and when I finished, I simply held the book to my chest.
Kiese Laymon had one hell of a year with two books -- Long Division and How To Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America. Long Division was such a strange book, but I couldn’t stop reading! Laymon has an audacious imagination and I admire the ambition of his novel and everything he tried to do. There’s so much cleverness, it could make you jealous if the book weren’t so good. His essay collection is hard but necessary reading because he tells the truth about race in America.
Other books I enjoyed include The Isle of Youth by Laura van den Berg, Alone with Other People by Gabby Bess, Love is a Canoe by Ben Schrank, The Book of My Lives by Aleksandr Hemon, Don’t Kiss Me by Lindsay Hunter, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz, The Name of the Nearest River by Alex Taylor, and Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote. I’m a bit mad about reading Revenge Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger because the plot was so ludicrous. The more I read, the angrier I got and by the end, I was, frankly, ready to write a letter. Andi would not make such choices! She just wouldn’t. What can I say? I get attached.
More from A Year in Reading 2013Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.

3 comments:

The power broker is my all-time favorite political read. Robert Moses is an astounding character. Yes, he was corrupt. But he accomplished things for the city that might never have been accomplished elsewise.

At the end of each year, I look forward to Hamilton’s list of books. Ever since I decided to try his suggestion of “Lords of Finance” a few years ago on a whim (a book I would have never thought to pick up myself), I’ve come to discover that for whatever reason, we have compatible reading tastes. I’ve read most of what Hamilton has recommended and have enjoyed them all, so I’m stoked to add these to my queue for 2015!

This was the year in which I first became aware of my annual Holy Trinity of reading: End Zone by Don DeLillo, Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen, and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass. Whatever happens to me during any given year, these are the three books I re-read, front to back, like ritual. But this year those books began to speak to each other during my reading experience. Perhaps appropriate to their respective content, I read End Zone during the summer, sufficiently inspired to do sprints on wooded trails during thick July afternoons. I settled into Gass’s book, particularly “The Pedersen Kid,” while the snow piled and piled. Hansen’s story of a stigmatic novitiate was fodder for Lent. This year I noticed that each book values atmosphere over plot, mystery over clarity. Those books are likely brothers.
I returned to The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. I still wonder over the narrative economy of “The Way It Has to Be.” Perhaps moved by similar nostalgia -- I began reading Pancake as an undergraduate, around the time I spent most mornings fishing -- I read The Art of Angling and Fishing Stories, two rich pocket books with words that will reawaken the souls of even the most cynical anglers. Not to mention that you can find a poem by Ron Rash about a fisherman who hooks his own eye: “My hair sweeps back like an evangelist’s, / as I cross the heart of the lake / toward Swaney’s Landing where I will testify / to those sunburned old drunks / of careless moments that scar us forever.”
I was able to review a few books this year for The Millions, and they are certainly worth revisiting in future years: Its Day Being Gone by Rose McLarney, Hold the Dark by William Giraldi, The Second Sex by Michael Robbins, 300,000,000 by Blake Butler, and Fat Man and Little Boy by Mike Meginnis. Each left a mark on me.
My reading year ended with two gorgeous new books of poetry, both debuts, both formed in the shadow of Roman Catholic culture and thought. Reliquaria by R.A. Villanueva offers shades of parochial school and the Meadowlands and how “my brother told us about the Cemetery of the Holy Sepulchre, / cut in half by the Parkway.” Villanueva’s volume is a lyric documentation of, among other themes, Filipino faith, a belief absolutely bound in the corporeal. Saints populate this book. Bodies, living and dead, real and imagined, are broken. It is also a book of the venial dissensions of childhood: a botched biology class dissection that turns heretical, and when the narrator dares a friend to “throw a bottle of Wite-Out at Christ’s face.” Any book authentic to the Catholic tradition will have its eye toward ashes, and Villanueva’s elegiac moments are sharp: “When you bury me, fold / my arms, neat // over the plateau of a double-breasted suit”; “I promise my ghost will find you / should you want someone else to love.” Villanueva’s book wonders about childhood, family, the distance from original culture, and of things eternal: “So what is it we’ve saved? Skull? Soul? Vulture? / Maybe this earth, turned in on itself and made.”
The second book, Bone Map by Sara Eliza Johnson, is well-paired with Reliquaria (what minor miracle of publishing that two secular presses -- University of Nebraska Press and Milkweed Editions -- release exquisitely crafted, meditative books about God and absence during the same year). I’ve been a fan of Johnson’s verse in literary magazines for some time; her poems have the ability to clear the air, to pause the mind. I am preternaturally disposed to love a book that begins with an epigraph of that wracked, devoted disbeliever, Ingmar Bergman. I thought of Bergman’s Hour of the Wolf while reading many of her pieces, including “Deer Rub.” A deer rubs its forelock and antlers against a tree, and the “velvet that covers the antlers // unwinds into straps, like bandages.” And then she manages quite the poetic turn; rain falls, “washes the antlers / of blood, like a curator cleaning the bones // of a saint in the crypt beneath a church / at the end of a century, when the people // have begun to think of the bodies / as truly dead and unraiseable.” This is why I read poetry: to see how words transfigure, how associations bring new life. By the end of the poem, the deer is dead. The bark has regrown. But the scene has a permanence “long after this morning / when the country wakes to another way, // when two people wake in a house / and do not touch each other.”
Johnson’s poems feel like a series of engravings discovered in an abandoned cabin deep in the forest; each is its own folkloric song. In “Confession,” one of the few prose poems in the book, a dream becomes a myth: “I hide under a thought of light, not incineration. The thought is a cloak I wake into gently; it is cold in the room, and I am hungry but whole.” I thought also of “Sea Psalm,” which begins so powerfully: “Lord, this is not your world. I am not yours / but also not mine. Not your passenger. Not your saint at the helm, the machinery // of my hands turning like clocks.” These moments of distance become full when the collection ventures further and further into the cold, as in “Letter from the Ice Field, January,” which is beautifully grotesque, Catholic gothic: “I stopped, and walked down into the crypt, knowing a saint had lain there for centuries. Her mouth lay open, as if to ferry over the word of a messenger. The saint had my face. The saint woke and rose from her coffin, and gave me her skin, which is a map of the earth, and her eyes, which see every planet. I took out my eyes and put hers in, then climbed into her empty coffin, my body glowing as hers had: like a femur in a fire, its marrow burning across the length of me.” The poem ends “Inside me you have learned to speak impossibly.” Bone Map was a reminder of how it felt to be devastated, made new by poetry. I can’t expect much more from a book.
More from A Year in Reading 2014Don't miss:A Year in Reading 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005The good stuff:The Millions' Notable articlesThe motherlode:The Millions' Books and ReviewsLike what you see?Learn about 5 insanely easy ways to Support The Millions, and follow The Millions on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr.